


Condition

by boxroot



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: Drabble, F/M, prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 16:32:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15343905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxroot/pseuds/boxroot
Summary: He lives in an urban graveyard.





	Condition

The place spun in shadows and blades of jagged light under the swirl of police lights behind the curtained window.

The quietness of the place was a usual thing even despite the new shortage of people living in it. There were other elements that laid everything in disarray, skewed the atmosphere from its norm, dipped the place in a look and feeling that was abnormally choked given the fact that for too many years to count, it had been so greatly different. Where the glass coffee table was once gently worn, smudged with the fingerprints of children and elders alike, marred with newspaper bits stuck to sugary coffee rings, there was an opened black cellular phone with a single name running across the screen - Harvey Dent - and stacks of newspapers piled, harshly folded in all places, beside it in such a way that there was no place where one could make out what might have been beneath the glass. Babs’ curtains were still here - a miracle in their own right, since she doted over them so much, offering small, snarky remarks over her love for them in the earlier days and turning to actual biting insults that dwindled into fights when things on the marriage front had begun to turn much worse. In her hands, they would have been dusted and shaken and stretched in the right places so their dark blue color was greeting and properly folded, but that wasn’t the case anymore. And maybe the couch cushions, bleak and greyish brown things, would have been emblazoned with the rich yellow color of Jr.’s damn macaroni stains, the middle cushion sporting lavender yarn in long, swoopy circles all chased by the askew points of their little girl’s knitting needles. Maybe the refrigerator would be full again and the house wouldn’t be so brown and the wood floors wouldn’t be grey, frail, gritty things that were soft, slippery with dust, a bit sticky when one stepped on them with bare feet. The shelves wouldn’t be so bare and there would be teapots sitting gladly next to textbooks that’d been read one time; there wouldn't be mugs (also used once, crusted with sugar deposition) decorating the counters and hollow spaces in the house. 

Coat hooks would be occupied with heavy, crinkly fabric that softly snapped and moved and wrinkled like foil made of thread when one of the kids heaved on a coat before rushing to check the mailbox. Beginner’s algebra would jutt crookedly from the gaping mouth of his daughter’s bookbag, and back when she was a wiggle-worm occupying the sheets of that barren third bed, maybe it would get ‘lost’ far in the back of an underwear drawer.

It was the general suffocating quiet that made it seem like Gordon’s home. There was the occasional buzz of a microwave heating take-out; the trickle of tap water or the rushed noise of a toilet being flushed and the pipes in the walls rattling like rusted cans, but the place was dark and lit by warm and heavy lights, and the curtains let in so little outside light, it was a wonder that most of the sounds he could hear in the house would come from the street. Alarms, alerts - the ring of a phone, the noise of wind pushing like rabid hands into the bricks of the neighbors’ homes just across the way. The lonely sounds of those animals that grazed for carcasses and rotten food in the green, rusted garbage bins. The slamming of heavy doors and the tossing of sighs and weary grunts - maybe a sob, maybe a choked, angry scream at nothing that was immediately threatening or worthy of any inspection beyond a general acknowledgement. If Gordon didn’t think about it, he could force the imagination of Barbara’s wispy, hallucinated body, slender and clad in grey yoga pants, hair frayed at the ends, brown and heat-burnt, lips sporting wrinkles that he often kissed at, just wandering the kitchen like she liked to do. She would turn at knobs in his imagination; sit at the counter and hum and play crossword. He could force the sound of her voice - the sound of it when it didn’t return his scream. The sound of it when she said things that sounded more like love and less like general frustration. But some days, he took what he could get, and that familiar anger was all he was offered.


End file.
